


home, with you, where we belong

by juldevere



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, and by someone I of course mean a scruffy freckled space prince, can someone pls give Echo a hug and never ever let her go, honestly though at this point I'll take whoever I can get
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:28:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24920836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juldevere/pseuds/juldevere
Summary: The stars feel very far away.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Echo
Comments: 6
Kudos: 24





	home, with you, where we belong

**Author's Note:**

> This follows the moment in 7x05, right after Echo has seen what has happened to Bellamy.
> 
> Fair warning that this is extremely soft and extremely angsty.

The screen fades into a wash of pixelation until it goes completely blank, abruptly switching off and as if a circuit breaker has been flipped, her vision too cuts out. All sense of awareness, reality, the very room before her, vanishing – the deceptive listlessness that might precede an annihilation.

Faintly, from a distance, someone is crying out her name.

_“Echo. Come home.”_

A hand, broad and firm, is at her back, between the blades of her shoulders and slowly a different space filters into focus; she can make out the muted rustling of a sheet and carefully reopens her eyes, adjusting to the dim lights of the bedroom they once occupied together on The Ring.

“Echo,” Bellamy says quietly, a heaviness to his voice and she feels as he speaks, his breath at her neck. This sensation, the familiarity of its intimacy, are what allow her to unclasp her own breath, her own body and within this resurfacing, she grows acutely aware of how close they are lying together, that it is his hand spread carefully across her back.

“Why are we here?” He asks and grazes his nose just barely against her skin; it’s soothing in a way that helps her think.

Why her subconscious brought them here isn’t hard to figure out - faced with unmatched distress, it has moved to the first place it associated with preservation - but she’s not sure how to begin to explain this, worried what’ll happen after she does. Rather than try to answer him by speaking, she begins to turn her body over. He helps her move, sliding one arm around her waist, cradling them together. 

“Echo.” He tries again after a moment.

Echo follows a haphazard pattern of freckles across his face, her throat tightening painfully. Her mind fills with the dozens and dozens of words she has thought to say to him across years’ worth of separation, words she had been reluctant to ever surrender aloud.

_Because, Belomi, I see your spirit in the faces and people around me, whether I want to or not. Because I miss you the way I have heard people talk about missing a home. Because I look up at the stars and I try to find you in them. Because I miss you. Because you were my home._

She avoids his gaze as she says what she can manage instead. What is least painful. Most true. “Because we made a promise.”

Bellamy, with seemingly infinite patience, waits for her to look at him. Holds her eyes without reservation once she does.

“It was our fourth year on The Ring,” He starts and she holds her breath, keeping herself very still, as if this will somehow offset the hurt of hearing this.

“I forget what month, it didn’t really matter. It had been a really hard day, probably one of the worst we'd had so far, everyone was upset. And that night neither of us could sleep but for some reason, we weren’t talking. Unwilling to admit to each other that we were growing anxious with our restlessness. But I realized as I was lying there, that despite it all, what was keeping me from completely losing it was that I still felt safe.” He takes a minute, the word safe filling the space around them, lining the walls, the bed, each other.

Her hand trembles as she reaches it over, as she tries to use her fingers to brush some hair off from his forehead, but it’s pointless, shaking as they are and he takes it before she can think to mask this, threading his fingers between hers, bringing their hands balled together beneath his chin.

“So I asked you to roll over and I held you the way I’m holding you now and I told you that I loved you, that I never wanted to do this without you and we made a promise to try. That we would figure it out, that we would find each other even if we went mad, that we would live.” He finishes, his voice barely above a whisper now and his eyes have filled with tears.

There is an unfurling matter coursing through her body, one that propels and ignites, no sense of stopping. It hurts as it moves, as it carves right through her, creating what feels like a chasm in her chest.

But he’s still got her hand, the one that was shaking, and he brings it to his lips, squeezing it and everything else but his grip and the face he has for her are forced to recede. She thinks back to that night. Of how a discord had been quelled within her. That his words and the promise and their love for one another and their family of seven was what was worth it - was what allowed there to be a difference between falling into the madness, letting it become all-encompassing and walking right along the edges of it.

“Will you stay with me?” She asks.

His face twists with pain and he brushes his lips against her forehead, feather-light. "You know I can't."

She closes her eyes against it and the agony in her chest is now overwhelming, the chasm growing wider and deeper, a seemingly debilitating formation. She can’t fathom how she will be able to rearrange her body, her spin, ribs back together around the nothing that is left there let alone be able to stand from this bed.

But he takes a breath, and because of how close they are, it inevitably moves against her, forcing her to breathe through it anyway.

Move anyway. Be whole, anyway.

“I love you.”

“Promise me.” He whispers and already he sounds far away, she isn't fast enough, not to open her eyes, not to answer and it's like being shoved under ice water, the way it feels to blink back into the white room again, the sterile white room that he no longer exists in.

The cracks that were caused from the destruction of her chest now twist and snap into new configurations, pervasive and cruel and urgent for more hurt to fuel them and Echo uses this current of energy not to breathe, but to propel herself forward. It is nothing but acidic instinct that compels her as she pummels against flesh, eyeing the spoke of the machine and thinking of stars as blood starts to smear her hands.

_“I promise.”_

The stars feel very far away.

**Author's Note:**

> a hug. someone. anyone. give IT TO HER.


End file.
